


The Tides Below

by Costume



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Horror, Lovecraftian, Murder Mystery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:08:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29142762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Costume/pseuds/Costume
Summary: Hina Saito is perfectly content with her dead-end job and her dead-end life, licking her wounds after a bitter Indigo League loss years ago. Well, mostly content. Let's say, not actively suicidal.Then a man is murdered on the shores of her adopted home of Cinnabar, and Hina must contend with an old rival, a mysterious cult, and an ancient force lurking beneath the sea.





	The Tides Below

On her mid-afternoon smoke break, Hina Saito inspected the wall of graffiti in the cramped alleyway beside the Amp 5 Roasters, the coffeeshop she worked at. Strictly speaking, she no longer smoked as of the Wednesday prior, when she had finished the last of her 'Zard Red's, but Hina would be damned if she gave up her reprieve from work on account of that. This past week, she'd mostly spent her smoke break milling about. On Monday, Hina had made faces at a Meowth lounging between two massive potted palms on a second-floor balcony. On Tuesday, watching a taiyaki man whisk together eggs and milk, she contemplated life as a street vendor. Yesterday, Hina had spent most of her fifteen minute reprieve desperately wishing for a cigarette. Today, it seemed, she would enjoy the arts.

The wall was layered with graffiti. If the cement had ever been painted, it had long since vanished. Hina's eyes darted around as aimlessly as her wanderings this past week. _FUCHSIA FEMMES 09.15_ announced hot-pink writing. (Hina had enjoyed the Femmes' new single, although she was wary of the acoustic guitar on principle.) It was partially obscured by a depiction of male anatomy. Farther down, a man jumped on a Snorlax's belly, as if it were a trampoline, in greyscale spray paint. And in a corner, beside a bubble-letter tag of what was either a lowercase K or an uppercase R...

Hina crouched to examine the graffiti that had caught her eye. The dark paint shone wetly, as if the tagger had disappeared right before she arrived. It was a silhouette of what looked like a lighter- god, Hina needed a smoke- or maybe a squat, backwards L, drawn with short and uneven strokes. On it were two circles, one inscribed within the other.

It was an eye.

"Hina! Hina!"

Hina started. Her boss's Trumbeak, especially nosy, even for the species, was hovering near the entrance of the alley. He said again in his clenched tone, "Hina!"

"Ok, ok, I'm coming, Umo," Hina said, and added, under her breath, "Stupid fucking bird." It was cosmic irony that Umo was a handsome creature, with a tail of iridescent sunset feathers that customers cooed over, because what Arceus should have made him was a goddamn rat.

Hina stood up, stretched out her cramped muscles, and turned to go back. She would not think of the strange symbol for some time.

* * *

It was a fallow period at Amp 5. Midterms had ended at the Cinnabar State extension campus down the road, and their twenty-something regulars had presumably traded in caffeine for alcohol. They'd be back in a month, but for now, the shop was empty save for a bearded man at the bar, writing in a leather bound diary. He had ordered a mocha latte and a few shriveled strips of the high-protein jerky intended for carnivorous Pokémon. Odd, but not unheard of. They were paleo.

It was an hour before closing; the radio, through a background radiation of static, played an 80's tune Hina wasn't familiar with. She was pretending to clean the espresso machine, and Etsu Kamaka, who owned the shop, was pretending to manage her. Though Kamaka-san's face and hands were now freckled with liver spots, she insisted on closing out once a week. Hina in turns disliked and appreciated the cantankerous old aunty's company. Hina was the oldest of Amp 5's employees, and the only one who worked full-time. The rest were college students, backpackers, or gap year takers. Their time on Cinnabar had a end date, whether it was graduation or going broke. Only she would remain. Her and Kamaka.

The song had ended. Through the bristle of static, the station cut to commercial. "Isn't it time for Cinnabar to benefit from Kanto's bounty?" said a crisp voice over an upbeat tune. "As a formal province, all of Cinnabar's community colleges would be fully funded. Thousands of our residents -"

"Mainlanders," spat Kamaka, twisting the channel dial in a swift motion. The radio dissolved entirely into static and she switched it off. "None of them have any respect for the island!"

"Not just mainlanders," the old man on the barstool said. "My grandson out in Johto, he has the nerve to call me- first I've heard from in damn near a year- to tell me to vote Yes!"

Hina swiped the espresso machine's surface without enthusiasm, leaving uneven streaks on the plastic. She was disinterested in politics, although, like most of Cinnabar's under 30's, she supported the proposition to formally join Kanto as a province.

"What we ought to do," Kamaka continued, now fully in her element, voice gaining in volume, "Is leave Kanto. None of this territory nonsense, none of the mainland's nonsense!"

Hina tuned out what was rapidly becoming the establishment of a rival government of gerontocrats, right there in Amp 5. As she brushed the damp rag over the coffee nozzle idly, she wondered if Kamaka remembered she was a mainlander. Maybe not; Hina took after her grandmother, an emigrant from Cinnabar, and had the brown skin and wide-set eyes that distinguished islanders from their Kanto counterparts.

Then again, Kamaka was old-school. She had the strange patriotic fervor that primarily manifested through a dislike of Kanto and the world beyond it. Kamaka didn't even own a transit card to ferry onto the mainland. Presumably, even a birth certificate stamped at Cinnabar's capital wouldn't be sufficient proof of true island blood. One would have to translate their state anthem into Old Ha'le cryptoglyphs to impress her. Hell, Hina wouldn't be surprised if Kamaka knew how to read the long-dead language.

"Hina! Girl, will you ever finish cleaning that old thing?" Kamaka snapped her fingers in Hina's direction, jolting her from her thoughts. The man had gathered his pen and book; his mug was neatly pushed to a corner.

"I'm done," Hina said quickly, stepping away from the machine. "I'll do the counter next." That would buy her at least 15 more minutes...

But Kamaka was smiling. She waved a hand marbled with veins. "Why don't you head home? I'll close out here. Let in Umo; it's time for his dinner."

* * *

It was the last truly warm day Cinnabar would enjoy that year. Hina cut through the university campus, her usual path home.

The campus was near empty as she stepped past the high stone arches of the entrance. She felt strangely possessive of the deserted space, as if her quiet witness to the campus over the last two years gave her ownership of the palm-ringed central knoll, the wide-roofed academic buildings. Hina wasn't a student there anymore, but she had walked past it during winter break and in the dead-heat of summer and at four in the morning, and if that didn't belong you to a place, what did?

The island was possessed of a strange anticipation, perhaps of the colder days to come. Hina expected to see Pachirisu seeking out one last acorn but there were none. In the distance, Hanua, the mother of all mountains, stood solemnly, ringed by a stream of dark smoke at the peak. The last eruption had been well over a decade ago; the next could be tomorrow, or a hundred years from now.

A quarter mile from the shotgun house she rented from a balding mainlander, one of the empty Pokéballs at Hina's hip vibrated. She tapped the button twice in response, and slowed her pace. All her Pokémon were free range now, had been for years, so it was mostly vanity that Hina still carried them with her.

Hina felt a burr of guilt. At least a year had gone by- closer to a year and a half- since she had last battled under the spotlight of a competitive arena. The statistics were sobering- ten years after participating in the Indigo League challenge, only 5% of trainers still worked the scene. Half the kindergartners in Kanto dreamed of running a gym when they grew up, but there were only a handful of openings, of course. Even Blaine, the oldest gym leader, had publicly stated he had no plans to retire.

Not one block over and she was assailed from above, by a golden body vibrating with excitement. Opaque wings, thin as pastry paper, beat against her back and shoulders as the figure tried to wind his arms around her- Beedrill weren't designed for giving hugs, but this one was doing his level best. "Aster, Aster, hey," Hina said, extricating herself from the attack. "It's good to see you, buddy!"

She scratched the short bristles on his striped torso in greeting. It rasped like a dry nib on parchment paper. Aster settled in a hover near her, his four wings making multiple minute adjustments per second in angle or velocity to maintain his position in midair. That, more than anything else, marked Aster as a trained Pokemon. Wild Beedrill rarely gained that kind of precision over their flight.

They walked in a pleasant silence, jostling shoulders. It was a tired old aphorism in the competitive scene that a trainer and their starter looked alike, took on each other's characteristics like the roots of a tree merging towards its trunk. Aster wasn't her starter, and Hina doubted any amount of time spent together would make a four-foot insect and a human look alike. They were the closest, though, and Hina supposed they had the same angular features- severe, like marble sculpted by an amateur.

"Thinking of joining Makamae and I for the weekend?" Hina tried to sound offhand, as if the temperature didn't plummet at night, as if Aster hadn't stayed with her a week the past month.

Aster hummed an affirmative. Hina cocked her head to study him; she noticed that the cornsilk-fine fur of his body was going white at the edges. The Beedrill line matured quickly, a veritable powerhouse barely a year after birth, but white hot star of their life went supernova fast too.

He was old, and it was breaking her heart. That was all there was to it.

Lost in thought, Hina's pace had slowed to the gentle plod of a sleepwalker. Aster turned to her, head tilted in confusion. To hide her sudden melancholy, Hina said, "You know, Aster, there's no bug food at home. Uchida's flowers still look good, though." Uchida was her neighbor, ex-military, with a mustache as fluffy and insubstantial as a dandelion in summer. He had taken to gardening during retirement. When she had first moved in to her house a year ago, Aster had nosed at Uchida's tulips, and the old gun had sicced a Raichu on him.

Aster's ruby eyes went wide; he buzzed in indignation. Hina broke into laughter. "Don't worry, I've got nectar for you. The expensive stuff- ow!" Aster had cuffed her head. She ducked underneath his bladed arm, then darted ahead, still cackling.

One day, she would have to talk with Aster about what to do with his increased frailty. But not today, when the sun was so friendly at their backs, catching in golden brilliance on Aster's arm blades.

* * *

That night, Hina would have the following dream, forgotten upon waking.

She walked along a shoreline at night, the sand cold underneath her feet. It was unnaturally dark, without even the whisper of city lights in the distance. For all Hina knew, the world beyond the beach had simply sunken into the void. She looked up-

The moon above was larger than she had ever seen, a blood moon, swollen, crimson, cruel as only a living thing can be. Hina stopped abruptly, entranced by the sight.

The moon did not change, but Hina felt the strange certainty of a dream, an impression, that there was a great cleft on the moon's surface, that some unnatural entity was straining past it, bursting old scabs into blood, that it blinked open clouded eyes, atrophied from disuse, and cast them-

Upon Hina.

It saw her. It _saw_ her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alola is Hawaii, but Cinnabar... is also Hawaii.


End file.
